10 Ex-Employees Share Their Old Company's Nasty Secrets

1. I worked at a certain big-box store several years ago. At the time, it had a yellow smiley face for it's logo. Now it is a weird star thing.Anyway, every Christmas, they would put out a bin for customers to donate toys, clothes, etc. to low-income children.Everything that went into that bin went back on the shelf. If it didn't have a receipt attached, we "couldn't prove it have been purchased." If it had a receipt, we were supposed to make sure it fell off.Don't donate anything at that store.

2. I worked at a grocery store for years and I can tell you that most dairy coolers are FILLED with mold.

3. If you ordered any vodka; Grey Goose Belvedere Titos Ketel one, etc You are getting Blue Ice vodka. Owner of the bar would pour cheap vodka into those bottles. I refused to do it myself, so he would do it. I made phenomenal money there, 350-500 a shift so i never said shit about it. After i quit i let people know. Was shut down 3 months afterFuck that guy.

4. Worked in a private owned doctors office. They would routinely schedule people with government insurance for appointments months out, and schedule people with private insurance for much closer appointments, next day even. Also, since Medicare and Medicaid won't pay for immunizations and therapeutic injections separately, when they are given during an office visit, they would schedule the patient for another appointment the next morning, and "give" the injection then. Thereby allowing them to bill it separately. The thing is, the patient never even knows about this "second" appointment, and their insurance pays the bills. The office manager would also sign into the doctors computers and send in narcotic rx's for patients under their names, even though she has no medical license at all.

5. At a movie theater where I used to work, at the end of the night, we would collect all the unsold popcorn and stuff it into these enormous yellow trash bags. The next morning, yesterday's popcorn was the first to go in the warmer. My boss said that popcorn was fine to reheat and serve for up to a week. We never dated the bags, though (bags that we were not allowed to throw away. We reused them all the time) so there was literally no way to know how old the popcorn was. Not as horrifying as some stuff here, but I thought it was kinda gross.

6. I worked at a gas station/ auto shop and I was told to dump used motor oil in the gravel behind the building because the storage tanks were full.

7. Went to an Aveda beauty school. Every year Aveda does a big recycling cap program, since most plastic caps cannot be recycled. We collected caps for a month, and our clients were really excited to be helping the environment. After the promo was done the instructors made us grab 3-4 garbage bags of caps each...and we threw them in the dumpster of the building next door. We didn't even use our own trash. Probably because Aveda can take away their franchising rights if they find any infractions.Also Aveda is owned by Estee Lauder so there is literally nothing natural about them. And they test on animals.

8. Female co-worker filed a complaint because a male co-worker slapped her ass. I watched management have him sign his paperwork for a "written warning" and then I watched management shred it while the female co-worker was at lunch. I worked in HR for them at the time. I can confirm they made no formal documentation of anything that happened that day. They shredded the only paperwork that even acknowledged it happened.

9. My first job was at a French bakery. It's a decent sized chain in the states. A list of their transgressions against humanity:I watched a pizza come out of the oven and fall toppings-side-down on an unusually filthy kitchen floor. This was on Mother's Day (busiest day of the year for a place like this) so it was scraped up (as instructed by a manager) and tossed back in the oven with a little extra cheese to hide all the crap stuck to it. I was made to serve this to a lovely older lady and it haunts me to this day.The cow. Holy fuck, the cow. This was what we called a huge fridge-sized milk dispenser that was never cleaned well. One day someone dragged this disgusting bastard out from the alcove it was in and, surprise surprise, nobody had cleaned under or behind it for months if not years. There was a several-inch-thick layer of spoiled milk with a technicolor carpet of mold across it. Makes my stomach turn just thinking about it.At 16 I was given the prestigious position of baking all of the bread / pastries / etc.. It was all frozen and it was not at all uncommon for me to find years old boxes in the freezer. Those were all cooked and served.Now, their transgressions against me:I was sealed in a human sized proofing oven for about an hour because of a faulty door. It was on, at a low temp / high humidity, but STILL.There was an actual oven with doors that opened like a kitchen cabinet (swinging open horizontally rather than open vertically) and it was placed around a corner at a high traffic area. Well, those doors did not move independently - they were linked so if you close or open one the other closed. I was leaned way into the fucker and guess what? Someone closed one of the doors as they were coming around which closed the other door as well. This resulted in me getting closed in and it was at about 450f. I struggled out by pressing the sides of my forearms against the doors resulting in pretty severe burns as big as a two computer mice on each forearm. I was made to complete my shift.Boxes in the freezer were stacked waaaay too high resulting in an avalanche of frozen cookie dough burying me in that bitch. I had to bang on the wall with my foot for about 20 mins before the sauté cook came and dug me out. Manager didn't give a fuck.Allow me to conclude this by saying that I worked in several other restaurants during my young life and NEVER came across anything REMOTELY like this again. I've never seen a waiter or bartender fuck with another person's food - as far as I'm concerned that's a myth. I've never seen such atrocious cleaning practices anywhere else, not even close.

10. This is way more lighthearted than most, but here it goes. I used to work at a fast casual burger place with a secret recipe BBQ sauce. The secret ingredient was Root Beer syrup.